


From Desert Heat to Cobbled Street

by Analinea



Series: Be still, my whumper's heart [19]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Day 31, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Left for Dead, Panic Attack, Tony Whump, Whumptober 2020, give it up for my brotp, it's light, it's the last one guys, plus bruce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27303466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Analinea/pseuds/Analinea
Summary: Tony wakes up a few hours later. He’s washed of colors, left too long in the midday sun. But he’s breathing; it’s all that matters.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark
Series: Be still, my whumper's heart [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947337
Kudos: 10
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	From Desert Heat to Cobbled Street

**Author's Note:**

> Title from an Imagine Dragons song and dialogue from a Doctor Who episode! I rewatched it just before october and I've been dying to use it since, it's weirdly fitting that I managed to do that for the last day!
> 
> Enjoy!

Tony wakes up a few hours later. He’s washed of colors, left too long in the midday sun. But he’s breathing; it’s all that matters.

Natasha watches through the window to the side of the door. She has witnessed the unnatural sleep of the injured many times before, she knows the stirring and twitching by heart now. 

“They left him in the street,” the agent behind her says.

She promised herself, once upon a time, to never care for the man pretending to be made of iron. The dying genius, stupid and egotistical, so vulnerable even as he pretends to be unbreakable. She blames his contradictions for the softening of her heart.

“They did what?” Her voice is controlled and cold. 

On the other side of the glass, Tony’s breathing tries to decide between the staccato of rising to consciousness and the slow drifting back into dreams. His eyes take the lead, fluttering open and rolling around a few times before focusing on Bruce, slumped in the chair next to the bed, softly snoring. Natasha’s smile is soured by the rage simmering in her guts.

As if it’s played on the glass separating her from Tony, she can picture him laying not on a mattress but on the wet, hard concrete of the sidewalk. Not at peace, but writhing for help, in the darkness outside of the streetlights. 

“Sorry?” in the window, Natasha sees the reflection of the agent tilting to the side to better understand her question. She doesn’t really  _ need _ him to repeat it, but something in her heart needs the confirmation of the worst her imagination has to offer. 

Tony, in the medical bay room, sighs and thumps his head back into his pillow. She understands his resignation; trying to resist the bed rest when he doesn’t have the necessary strength would only highlight his current weakness.

But once he’s feeling better, not even Steve will be able to keep him from running out and into his workshop, into the armor, into the sky.

Natasha can’t reproach him for hating staying still; no member of the team can. They’re all made of the same fabric after all, no matter the differences in patterns and colors. 

“They left him where?” she specifies, uncrossing her arms; despite her calm demeanor, the agent takes half a step back. 

Tony slides his IV hand over the sheet covering him to prod at Bruce’s knee, jolting him awake, glasses askew. Most people would take in his wringing hands and extrapolate him frantically nervous in situations like these, fluttering around in worry.

In truth, he’s more grounded than Tony. He straightens up, puts a gentle hand on Tony’s shoulder and talks. Natasha can’t hear what they’re saying, but annoyance grows on Tony’s face as the conversation continues so Bruce is probably announcing that he needs to stay here at least until tomorrow. 

Still, even with the obvious grumpiness, Tony hasn’t mastered yet how to hide the gratitude of not waking up alone. 

“Just...in the street.” It sounds so simple put like this. 

But no word can easily explain the slow crumbling of Tony when his eyes follow the trail of memories, when his breath catches on the edge of them, when he remembers. 

Natasha looks down just a second, into what she imagines Tony to be reliving as his trembling fingers extend towards his ARC reactor before pressing on it to the point of hurting. 

It’s not hard to take the consequence and thread together how the cause played out: The agent takes a full step back when Natasha says: “They took his reactor out, and chucked him out, and left him in the street.”

From knowing that, she knows exactly how Tony folded over, mouth open on the betrayal of his own convulsing lungs. He surely clawed at his own chest as she saw him do before, no blue light to keep him alive. Maybe his other hand desperately tried grasping at the person who just ripped his life out, and he got kicked down for it. The attacker didn’t even deign a glance back as he left with the only worth of Tony Stark in hand; the rest merely waste to get rid of.

Tony might have crawled, body aware of the lack of hope but mind never giving up. Even at Tony’s worst, Iron Man doesn’t stop trying because if he does what did he live this long for? Why did he cross the desert? 

Natasha’s training allows her to watch it happen in her mind knowing she’ll never be too far off from the truth; each scene is a piece of shrapnel closing in on her heart. 

She looks up; Bruce is trying to reassure Tony but the lines and colors on the monitor next to the bed start painting a panic attack. 

Natasha loosens her clenched fists and figures she’s losing control over her emotions by letting herself be tied to so many people. Whether it will become a liability or add value to her handling of missions, she doesn’t care. She wants to know what it feels, to be Hawkeye on top of a building, letting himself fall and trusting to be caught before hitting the ground. 

She makes her move; she hears the sharp intake of breath at her back, then the relieved sigh when she opens the door to her left instead of acting on her anger. 

Retaliation or justice, it can wait. But getting to Tony’s side, guiding him back into a place where no one will leave him behind, gasping for breath around a failing heart, that comes first. 

For all of them, as the team files in one by one during the day and takes their places around the bed, it comes first. It’s a strange routine, and maybe it shouldn’t be when it means they’re so often injured they’ve turned bedside vigil into an act of domesticity. 

But Natasha doesn’t trouble herself with asking if this is wrong; because at its core, this is right.

This is family. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](https://kinsbournescream.tumblr.com)
> 
> Kudos and comments make me happy :)


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